Project description
Social factors and interpersonal neural synchrony in learning
Social interaction is vital for learning. During interactive learning, a teacher’s and a learner’s brains can become temporally aligned – a phenomenon called interpersonal neural synchrony (INS). We still do not know which social factors drive learning and this brain-to-brain alignment. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the LEARNINSYNC project will study this in two experiments. The first uses EEG hyperscanning to record brain activity from a teacher and two learners while varying social context and teaching style. The second uses transcranial electric stimulation, applying very low electrical currents to the scalp to gently influence brain activity and induce synchrony. This will reveal whether INS has a causal role in learning and whether it is one of the mechanisms by which people learn from others.
Objective
Social interaction plays a pivotal role in human learning across the lifespan. Research shows that learning in social interaction co-occurs with inter-personal neural synchrony (INS), i.e. the temporal alignment of teacher-learner and learner-learner brain activities. In addition, some have proposed that INS may actively facilitate learning. However, previous work i) does not identify the specific social contextual factors responsible for the emergence of learning, INS and the INS-learning association and ii) provides mainly correlational rather than causal evidence of the INS-learning association. LEARNINSYNC aims to overcome these limitations. It combines EEG hyperscanning and multi-person transcranial electric stimulation (tES) to i) identify the specific social contextual factors contributing to learning, INS and INS-learning association and ii) test whether INS causally promotes learning. Experiment 1 adopts a 2x2 design where two participants (learners) learn from a third one (teacher) in social contexts varying the co-presence of the other learner (present or absent) and the teaching contingency (live or recorded). During the learning stage, EEG signals are measured from all three participants. This will characterise inter-brain dynamics across three people, moving beyond predominant dyadic literature and closer to real-world group learning. Experiment 2 tests the causal role of INS in learning: it exogenously induces teacher-learner and learner-learner INS during the learning stage, by mirroring the neural signals’ frequency, phase, and topography observed in experiment 1, and compares learning after real vs sham stimulation. Understanding the causal role of INS in social learning will inform current theories of INS and models of social and educational neuroscience. In a world where remote and asynchronous learning is increasingly prevalent, this work carries societal impact in the development of interventions for educational and work settings.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences neurobiology
- social sciences educational sciences didactics
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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16163 Genova
Italy
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